The future economic growth of the Caribbean lies in green technology and fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, not in Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE), said senior research fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, Dr Don Marshall.
In a frank discourse last Friday at the Democratic Labour Party’s headquarters in George Street, Belleville, St Michael, Marshall said this was one of the problems with CARICOM.
“One of the signal protocols that CARICOM did not contemplate was industrial deepening. FIRE is where the bulk of money is [currently] made in the Caribbean, [so] the players in that area are extremely happy with CARICOM. There is no hindrance to their business in that area, so their vision of capital deepening is neither affected nor clogged by this structure of infinite deferral called CARICOM.
“‘We like it so’ – that is their collective cry but we are not in a world-development context which provides us with crumbs of comfort; we are in a world-development context that says to us structurally, your unemployment figures will rise; dreams will be dashed and the employed will not be allowed to sleep,” he said.
As such, Marshall, whose lecture was entitled The Integration Movement: Where We Are And What Should Be Done To Enhance It, said the Caribbean had to fashion a new development model, one outside the limited CARICOM perception.
“We need to stop looking at foreign investors with a disapproving eye [and] we should create disincentives as limitations for owning our lands. [There is] a lot of noise on what is an issue settled in other small developing countries . . . but there is a vested interest in keeping the people ‘dumbed down’ into that debate because that does not get you to the hard questions of attracting industrially developing [Foreign Direct Investment],” he said.
Marshall said while developing the offshore financial sector and the international business sector was important, they were only “gravy” and should not represent the development of an entire country.
“They bring in some revenue to keep things going but the reality is that we need to earn more revenue to satisfy our gargantuan appetites, and neither international business alone nor tourism can cut it,” he said.
Marshall said it was nonsense to think a CARICOM Single Market and Economy, which he said was conceptualized back in 1989, could present the institutional matrix required to capture today’s opportunities, calling it a “slow, cumbersome institution” which lacked both soul and function.
“Unless it is set up to crack up the dominance of capitalist interest in the direction of FIRE, then all CARICOM will do is reproduce the backward order in the different national economies.
“It must be a space that would give and breathe life into those many industrially driven entrepreneurs to find new markets and opportunities for joint-venture arrangements,” he said.
